The Darkest Hour Is Just Before the Dawn. How to Transform Trumpism After Trump

Oct 30, 2020

On Post-Truth, Post-Democracy, and Post-Humanity.

The US election next week feels like a planetary watershed moment, with implications well beyond the United States. This moment has an exterior and an interior dimension.The exterior dimension is a referendum on the occupant of the White House. But a change there will not on its own change much. The interior dimension is a change in the heart — a change in the inner place that we operate from as we move forward in this critical decade.

As the Trump administration predictably continues its path of denial and self-destruction, we are reminded of the observation, attributed to Abraham Lincoln, that

“you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

While no one knows for sure what’s going to result from the election process in the United States, or whether chaos might ensue thereafter, here is why I have had a good feeling about it: to me this final stretch feels like a microcosm of what we have already seen, a micro-version of the past three-plus years: the key institutions of US democracy — and by implication the resilience of our international system of solidarity and governance — is bending, bends more, but doesn’t break — and finally will bounce back better, bounce forward.

Yes, you can fool people; yes, you can be in denial — some of the time. But if you put yourself and your country on a profound collision course with reality — which is what the Trumpist response to COVID-19 amounts to — sooner or later that reality will bite back. And it looks as if that moment of reckoning is about to arrive.

Living in the United States and on this planet at this unprecedented historical moment, you can feel the tension in the air literally everywhere. I feel it here in Boston. And friends around the world tell me the same is true where they are.

“This election is going to be a monumental moment,” my colleague Frans S. from Jakarta said recently. “I am watching every minute of it,” says our Zambian colleague Martin Kalungu Banda, who lives in the UK. This is not just a referendum on US democracy; it feels like a referendum on our aspirations as human beings.

Read the whole article here